>  If I understand what you are saying, when releasing, say, 1.6.3, the jclouds-version property (now replaced by project.parent.version) 
> will make the labs projects use 1.6.3 as a dependency

@zack-shoylev Sorry, I didn't explain that very well, it seems ;-) With the POM as currently suggested, the _jclouds_ version is not the problem, since a separate property controls that. The problem is the version _of this project itself_.

The POM as currently written inherits its version for the parent `jclouds-project` POM, so they must always be in lockstep. So let's consider what happens for the 1.6.3 release.

  1. The main jclouds project will be released. That creates a `jclouds-project` POM with version 1.6.3. This labs project will still be a snapshot
  2. We then want to release this labs project. Presumably, the 1.6.3 labs project release should depend on `jclouds-project:1.6.3`, so we would have to change that dependency before the release of this project
  3. But then _we can't release this project any more because it doesn't have a snapshot version_ - it will immediately inherit the 1.6.3 version from the jclouds-project dependency change in step 2

So the version of _this_ project has to be decoupled from the version of the _parent_ project. And then `jclouds-version` can simply be replaced by the version of the parent project, since it refers to dependencies from the main jclouds project.

Does that make more sense?